Writing China: Louisa Lim, ‘The People’s Republic of Amnesia’

When a publisher approached NPR correspondent Louisa Lim to write about the events that took place at Tiananmen Square in 1989, her initial thought was ‘Absolutely not.’ But the more Ms. Lim, who spent a decade working in China before moving back to the U.S. in 2013 for a fellowship at the University of Michigan, thought about the 25th anniversary of the protests, the more she says she realized that nobody has written about its legacy based on accounts of the people who lived through the events.

Oxford University Press

In her new book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,” Ms. Lim deftly tells the stories of what happened in 1989 from a variety of perspectives. She speaks to a mother who can’t mourn the place where her son died during the protests — because a security camera is always watching for her return – as well as to a People’s Liberation Army solider who was tasked with helping quash the protests by burning any shred of evidence that students had ever camped out in the square.

China Real Time spoke with Ms. Lim from her home in Ann Arbor, Mich. Edited excerpts:

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Tiananmen is such a sensitive subject. What were some of the precautions you took while writing the book?

I never spoke about the book either at home or in my office [because] both of them were in a diplomatic compound, which is widely believed to be bugged. I never mentioned the book on the telephone, on email or on Skype or Weibo. If I wanted to go and do an interview with someone, I would set it up without telling them what it was about. When I got there, I’d say this is what I’m doing, will you talk to me? Sometimes I’d go quite far on the hope that people would agree to talk to me, and most did agree. I didn’t tell my children for a long time because my kids were only 7 and 5 at the time and I worried they might talk about it. Perhaps those precautions weren’t necessary, but I was always mindful that the major risk wasn’t taken by me; it was being taken by the people I was talking to.

Official death tolls and eyewitness accounts vary widely. How did you reconcile what information is out there?

It was difficult because it’s a book about memory and forgetting, and the human memory is fallible. I didn’t realize quite how fallible it was until I started to hear accounts of the same events from two, three or four different participants, and they would remember completely different things.

When it comes to objective, factual information, the biggest problem was with the chapter about [protests in] Chengdu and knowing what sources to believe. I read newspapers, I read propaganda accounts, I read U.S. diplomatic cables and I went to original sources. I found as many eyewitnesses as possible. People also sent me a lot of photographs. I ended up with more than 1,000 pictures of the protests. I was even sent a secret report that had been written by a Communist Party member that he wrote and smuggled overseas in the hope that someone would tell the world what he had seen. In a way it was really heartbreaking that it took 25 years for that to actually happen.

The chapter on the Chengdu protests [that took place alongside the more well known Beijing ones] shows how Chinese people practice collective forgetting. How many other examples do you think there are like this?

There are untold stories, and Chengdu was not the only one. There were demonstrations in Xi’an and Changsha that were suppressed violently and nobody has ever really told those stories either. In Xi’an there was similar kinds of fighting between riot police and ordinary people. There was footage shown on television afterward of people being detained, being held in a government compound covered in blood and being kicked and beaten by police. The students there said maybe around a dozen people died, but nobody that I have found has written about it in great detail.

Your book shows how the events of 1989 don’t even register for the younger generation of Chinese. What happens when people aren’t aware of the past?

There are all kinds of interesting ramifications. You have this situation where censors working at newspapers don’t even realize what they’re supposed to censor because it makes no ripple on their consciousness when they see the words “June 4.” The success of the government’s strategy of censorship could implode going forward because so many people are very ignorant about it.

You use the analogy of taking a hammer to crush a flea to illustrate the Communist Party’s way of suppression. Does this explain the recent roundups of people ahead of the 25th anniversary?

I’m surprised at the ferocity of the roundup this year. It is the first year that people are being criminally detained for holding remembrances behind closed doors in private. We’ve seen a sea change in what is viewed as acceptable—and it appears that very little is acceptable this year.

What surprised you most in writing this book?

The Chengdu chapter. When I started writing, I actually didn’t know almost anything about it. It just seemed so extraordinary that this could’ve happened in living memory and yet no one talked about it, no one remembered it, and there was almost no writing about it anywhere. We’re talking about protests that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands were present at on a daily basis. That was really overwhelming to me.

A lot of the people I spoke to for the Chengdu chapter have written to me and said it’s been an emotional and cathartic experience. One person said he had begun to doubt his own memory because it all seemed so unlikely and he wondered whether he’d been making things up. To read what other people saw, this process of corroboration, was an incredibly valuable thing to know that his mind hadn’t been playing games. So many times I would hear people say, “I thought I was the only person who saw that.” It was nice to be able to give them some measure of confirmation.

Do you think you’ll be able to come back to China?

I don’t know, but I hope so. Tiananmen is such a radioactive topic, especially this year, so it’s difficult to know what’s permitted and what isn’t. I decided to write this book with the knowledge that I would say what I needed to say and that I wouldn’t be hampered by having that consideration in the back of my mind – can I say this, will that stop me from getting back in. We shouldn’t behave in that way because to do that is to collude, so I tried not to think about those things when I was writing the book.

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